Played more Halo 4. I really should write something about how great the gunplay feels and how well designed all the combat scenarios are. I just played a long segment that showed off the variety of long-range scoped weapons in the game, and I don't think I've ever felt more comfortable maneuvering a sniper rifle with an analog stick. It's just perfect.

But then that fun game play sequence ended with a big story dump. Maybe it's my cold medication talking, but the backstory in this game borders on incomprehensible.

Spoiler for Hiden:

According to the last batch of cinematics, the Prometheans are actually humans who arrived in the galaxy thousands of years ago while fleeing the Flood. They were transformed into digital entities by a device called The Composer on the logic that the Flood only consume organic material, but the process drove them insane and it was discovered they had no way to be restored to organic bodies again.

This information is delivered by the Librarian, a Forerunner who was digitized herself -- not driven insane, apparently -- and who now wants to accelerate Master Chief's biological evolution so that he can stop the Didact.

The Didact is...well, a bad guy, for sure. He beats up Master Chief. Beyond that is anyone's guess. The Librarian credits the Didact for rising up against the conquesting ancient humans, which you would think was a good thing, except then he was locked up in a big metal sphere. I guess he was trying to use the Composer to digitize all of humanity? This part gets super opaque, though, as I have no idea who imprisoned him, how they succeeded in the face of his godlike superpowers, or how the humans reverted into cavemen living on a single planet with no technology and no Flood zombies to eat them.

I was pretty confused during parts of Halo, Halo 2, and ODST too. They all wound up making sense by the end. The different here is that none of the characters seem to acknowledge that the multifaceted chaos erupting all around them is even slightly surprising, contributing to the feeling that all of these wild revelations make perfect sense to them so far.

Finally, when this game is over, I'm going to do some searching to see if there's a reason Jen Taylor tanked her Cortana performance so hard. She has the most lines in the game by a factor of four, so it gets super distracting when half of them sound like she didn't even realize the microphone was on.

Halo 4 was, I hate to say it, pretty bad in general. Sorry to the developers that read here. They dropped the ball on the game simply put.

Terrible enemies that were not fun to even shoot, music (generic rock music track #1 playing now? oh. good.), story was pretty bad like you said, characters I didn't give two shits about, levels that were all the same (ride this tram (again) and get off at the same looking places multiple times to shoot the terrible enemies. Sadly, I found myself wanting it to be over before it was. And that never happens with me and a Halo game.

There were a few good things I found. The MP I did find surprisingly fun though. Enough of a change that it felt a little refreshed even if it is trying to turn into a CoD title. The Mantis areas were pretty fun too, but maybe I just need another MechWarrior title on the consoles. The main UNSC guy was pretty good and I liked interacting with him mostly. The game just seemed to be missing the heart that Bungie puts into their stuff. I'm sure I'll play H5 when it comes out. Hell it will probably get me to pick up a xb180 if I haven't already by then but it will need to be a better game than H4 for me to care much.

Ironically, I just replayed through ODST the last couple days. Awesome game. Fun characters, different atmosphere from the main Halo games but it still felt like a proper game, the music is probably my favorite in the series. You must have played the game in a different order than the directed one. I did that my first time through and it felt a little strange to me as well. I explored the city and just went where the beacons were located. ODST is probably my favorite Halo game and one of my top 5 this past generation easily.